Manufacturing a Crisis

Jonathan Schell | November 27, 2000

The postelection battle for the presidency is without doubt some kind of crisis, but it's not easy to define precisely what kind. David Broder has suggested in the Washington Post that it grows out of deep divisions in the country. "The nation has rarely appeared more divided than it does right now," he writes, and attributes the phenomenon to quarrels left over from the 1960s among the "polarized baby boomers." Of course, it's true that the vote for Congress as well as the President was exceedingly close, and in that sense the country is, literally, divided. Division, however, should not be confused with polarization. On the contrary, the even split of the electorate can be attributed to the opposite of polarization--namely, the centrism of the candidates. Each carefully tailored his campaign to appeal to a reportedly contented "center," and each, unsurprisingly, won nearly half of it. The fact is that the United States, prosperous and at peace, is, politically speaking, more asleep than it is agitated. Almost 50 percent of the public did not bother to vote. Not a division in the country but a division between two politicians to win over a united country has been the source of the turmoil.

The battle, then, is between the parties rather than the people. It is, in the words of social critic Tom Engelhardt, a crisis of politics but not of the polity. A top-heavy establishment--overfunded, overpowerful, overcovered--has imposed its power struggle on a country that wants no part of it, except, perhaps, as entertainment. Almost entirely lacking in substance, that struggle possesses the logic more of vendetta than of authentic competition. A better analogy than the ideological divisions of the sixties would be the feuding Hatfields and McCoys of legend, or perhaps the Guelphs and Ghibellines of the Middle Ages. Like two armies fighting an unpopular war, both parties try to recruit support from a populace that for the most part would just as soon watch football. The consequence is the disconcerting spectacle before our eyes of all-out political war in a politically apathetic land.

It is important, though, to be more exact in assigning responsibility for the disturbance. The pressures of American politics create a temptation among journalists to practice a meretricious even-handedness in judging the parties. It is, of course, important for journalists to be nonpartisan. That is, they should exercise independent judgment, uninfluenced by any party interest. Being nonpartisan, however, does not mean blaming the two parties equally in all situations; it means judging both by the same standards and letting the chips fall where they may. If they are equal offenders, then that should be said, but if one party is by far the greater offender, then that must be said, too, even if it falsely creates an appearance of partisanship.

Such is the case at present. The Democrats have hardly been pacifists in the struggle. Their record is barren of moves taken for any evident reason but winning the presidency. The language of Gore's spokesmen and lawyers has at times been intemperate, as when the lawyer Alan Dershowitz called Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris "a crook." Yet by far the most dangerous escalations have come from the Republican camp. During the first ten days of the crisis, the fight was kept within certain bounds on both sides. Then came the Florida Supreme Court's decision to order Harris to refrain from certifying the election until further instruction. The GOP responded with a torrent of unsubstantiated defamation of the Gore campaign and of the boards conducting the recount in Florida. House Republican whip and impeachment zealot Tom DeLay announced without evidence that the election was "nothing less than a theft in progress" in Florida. A new spokesman for the Bush campaign, Governor Marc Racicot of Montana, charged that Democratic supervisors, by disallowing absentee military ballots without postmarks by Election Day and with other deficiencies, "have gone to war in my judgment against the men and women who serve in our armed forces," and opined that "when the American people learn about these things, they're going to ask themselves what in the name of God is going on here." Governor William Janklow of South Dakota announced that the Democrats "are going to steal the election." And Bush's press secretary, Karen Hughes, accused the Gore campaign of "reinventing and miscounting the true intentions of the voters."

At the same time, Republicans were beginning preparations to carry the battle beyond the Florida courts--into the Supreme Court, the Florida legislature and Congress. Former Senator Bob Dole and other Republicans said they might consider boycotting a Gore inaugural. Implicit in these preparations was the threat that if Bush didn't get his way in Florida the Republican Party was prepared to turn what so far has been a legal battle in one state into a true constitutional crisis. In that case, the mere party crisis, arising out of nothing more than a few people's love of power and lack of restraint in grasping for it, will have, by their single-handed efforts, created the national division that the country itself has failed to produce.